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Recipe & Process
Recipe & Process
Primary
Primary
13 lbs 10.25 oz Orange Blossom honey
16 lbs frozen triple berry blends
Water to 7.25 gal
10g Laffort Spark Yeast
Gravity & ABV
Gravity & ABV
Calculated OG was 1.075
ABV: 11.14%
FG: 1.04800
Nutrients
Nutrients
I used Fermaid O instead of GoFerm - in the amount that you would normally use GoFerm, which is more Fermaid O than you'd normally use for this. I'm not sure if you're supposed to do that or not. Haha
I decided to just spread the Fermaid K and DAP over the four staggered additions and not use any more Fermaid O (the original plan was to to Fermaid O for the first two additions and then Fermaid K + DAP for the latter two).
So basically I did this totally wrong but here's what I used anyway, haha
18.75g Fermaid O (pitch)
13.80g Fermaid K (3.45g per staggered addition)
1.9g DAP (0.48g per staggered addition)
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Pitched on 08/02/2020
Rough racked 08/29/2020
Racked and stabilized 09/21/2020
Back sweetened to 1.050
Lab measurements 11/09/2020
ABV: 11.14%
SG: 1.04800
Curious that my ABV was fairly far off! Perhaps back sweetening diluted the brew a bit on top of some inherent margin for error duplicated by having to step feed. Also, I believe the hydrometer that went bad on us was used for the early to middle part of the process, so perhaps that threw things off as well.
Filtered and bottled (or blended) 11/16/2020
That concludes this mead!
The lab measurements I got on this brew demonstrated that somewhere in this chart, there's a significant inaccuracy with the ABV calculations, as it actually came in at 11.14%. In this case that's right what I was originally hoping to get with this brew, so I'm kinda glad my math was wrong. I'll have to see if I can figure out where my calculations went wrong though, for future reference's sake.
Retrospective
Retrospective
Process Improvement
Process Improvement
I was originally going to bag the fruit but gave up on it - I'm going to need much bigger bags for 16 lbs + of fruit.
It's always better if you can defrost the fruit a bit further ahead of time. We picked it up from the store on brew day and this was about all the time we had to defrost, though I guess I could've let it sit on campden a day before pitching.
Recipe Improvements
Recipe Improvements
We used 5 of the 3 lb bags from Walmart and a single 1 lb bag to round it up to the 16 lbs desired volume. It's probably better to calculate in multiples of 3 lbs if we're going to get frozen berries from Walmart again - I had chosen 16 lbs as a multiple of the 4 lb bags that Costco sells, but I stuck with it because I didn't want to adjust my recipe same-day again.
Also, one of these bags had a different blend than the others, and all of them were different from Costco. Most of these are raspberry, strawberry, and blueberry. One of them had cherries - I think instead of the strawberries?
By the time this mead was bottled, the strawberries had taken over. Which is quite strange, as I was under the impression that they were a delicate flavor - but nonetheless, this basically just became a strawberry mead. To the extent I think I'll use a different name on the label when I make one.
This tastes almost like alcoholic strawberry jam. To my personal tastes I would prefer a little more complexity and less sweetness, but I hope this flavor profile will have a relatively broad appeal for the wedding guests, many of whom are not whiskey and bourbon drinkers like myself.
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